things first, to conserve the human factors that will make homes, to make education everywhere in school and church and home count first of all for character.  And that broader education we ourselves must test first of all by this, whether it makes youth competent to live aright, cultivates the love of worthy ideals, and makes him willing and able to pay the price of a trained life consecrated to the service of his world, to the love of his fellows, and to the making of a new world.

We shall need, first, to safeguard the primary motives that enter into the founding of families.  Those motives begin to develop early.  They are in the making in childhood.  Somehow we must plan the education of youths so that they will think of homes and of marriage in new terms.  Possibly the public school will not only teach the physiology of marriage and the bare physical facts of sexual purity, but will teach new ideals of family life; it will count it at least as much a duty to cultivate a love of home as it is to cultivate a love of country.  It can set so clearly the final objective of character that even children shall see that life has higher ends than money-making and the family greater purposes than garish social display.

Sec. 2.  THE CHURCH AIDING

Certainly the church must seek to quicken and develop new ideals of family life; it must bring religion to our hearths and homes; it must worry less about a “home over there,” and show how truly heavenly homes may be made here.  It must not only get youth ready to die, it must prepare them to live; to live together on religious terms.  It will do this, not only by general discussions in the pulpit, but by special instruction in classes.  No church has a clear conscience in regard to any young person contemplating the duties of a family whom it has not directly instructed in the duties of that life.

It is a strange spectacle, if we would stop long enough to look at it, of the church proclaiming a way of life but scarcely ever teaching it.  In any church there is a large number of young people under instruction; what are they learning?  Usually a theological interpretation of an ancient religious literature.  Some still are learning to hate all other persons whose religion differs from the brand carried in that institution.  In a few years these youths will be bearing social burdens, facing temptations, taking up duties; does their teaching relate at all to these things?  No, indeed, that would be “worldly”; it would seem to be sacrilegious to teach them how actually to be religious.  The business of the church school is still largely that of filling minds with theological data rather than training young, trainable lives to become religious schoolboys, religious voters, religious parents.  How many have been at all influenced by Sunday-school teaching when they stepped into a polling-booth, when they chose a life-mate, when they guided or disciplined their children?  If religious education does not at all influence us in the great events of life, of what value is it to us?  Must it not be counted a sheer waste of time?